Yet when we walked into our local bookstore and saw a HUGE display of all the Piggie and Elephant books at the entrance to the Children's section, we had never heard of them! I totally thought it was a brand new series he put out, but no, they have been around for years!

We brought a couple home that night, including We Are in a Book, and the kids laugh SO hard at this book! I'm not kidding- if you say the word BANANA! in our house, my kids will be rolling on the floor!

After reading it for the kabillionth time I thought, wouldn't it be fun to put my kids in THEIR own book? So I did! It was pretty easy too! I'll share how I did it below if you'd like to make one too.

When she writes in this book, she loves writing some of the same words in the Mo Willems book, like Banana, Hahaha and Heeheehee. She also likes writing the author's name on the cover as well as tracing the word bubbles.

I don't think you would HAVE to read the Mo Willems book first but I highly recommend it whether you plan to do this activity or not. I love how it gets kids paying attention to the different parts of a book and using the vocabulary of reading, like page and reader. But to do it in such a fun way too, how rare is THAT! Love it!

Writing Activities Dry Erase Book

So to make a related writing activity for We Are in a Book, I started with a few pictures of our kids. We just had family pictures taken by our local professional photographer with the kids in front of a white backdrop, so I had the digital copies from the photopgrapher for a few of the images. If you don't happen to have super awesome pictures already, have your kids pose in front of a white wall and take a few funny and serious shots. Take some full body and some close ups.

Once you have the pictures you want saved to your computer, you can use a program like Microsoft Publisher or a website like PicMonkey.com to design a landscape full sheet or 8 X 10 page. Add 1-2 photos to each page with a word bubble over their heads. You can design each full sheet to have 2 pages, which you can cut in half once printed. Play with scale the way they do in the book, by cropping some really close up and some really tiny ones to appear far away. Make as many as you like. I made 4 full sheets of 2. You could also print multiple copies if you don't feel like designing a lot of different ones.

Print your pages out. Once they are dry, cut them in half and decide if you want your pages to be laminated back to back or as single pages. Lay them out the way your want them into laminating pouches and use a laminator to laminate them. Once cooled, cut the pages out and use a single hole punch to punch holes. Use the first page as a template to punch out the holes in the rest.

-Take turns with your child writing the words of the story.
-Have siblings write in different colors in the same book to make a dialogue together.
-Have your child add the page numbers, author name and other elements of a book.
-Use the book to practice site words or recent vocabulary words.
-For younger writers, practice writing smaller letters to fit in the word bubbles.

What ways can you think of to play and learn with this fun writing activity?

If you liked this book-inspired writing activity please do pin it!

Fine Motor Fridays

Once again we are back for another week of Fine Motor Fridays! As usual the other FMF Bloggers and I are getting together to share playful fine motor skills activities. Please click though to see what the other FMF bloggers have been up to! While you are at it, check out our Fine Motor Book and our Pinterest Board!!